Fewer armaments don't necessarily mean more stability. The outcome of a chess match where both sides have all their pieces is far less clear than one where one side has two pawns and the other one. There are many scenarios in the latter case where one side can predict victory with 100% -- which would certainly encourage them to play the game for high stakes.
I am more interested in the plausible nuclear endgame scenarios than I am in the number of cities we could level with the initial force. That endgame analysis is the one that is going to deter people. The likelihood of someone "going for it" diminishes as the likely endgame states become more clearly and more convincingly bad, and as the diversity of strategic viewpoints convinced of those states grows. You don't have "enough" until the other guy knows damn well you'll have enough no matter what he does.
That endgame analysis is currently completely unacceptable to either side. So why would we mess with that? Because there isn't much strategic tension between the US and Russia _today_? No one would have predicted such relations 25 years ago, and I doubt anyone can predict the situation 25 years from now. Russian behavior in Georgia, Chechnya and Eastern Europe hardly suggests they're abandoned their ambitions. I'm sure they have a similar opinion of our activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US and the Soviets had constructed a reasonably stable strategic position by the 70s and 80s, which is something of a miracle given the frightfulness of these weapons. I think we'd better be pretty careful before we completely dismantle that. It isn't as if anyone will forget the construction of atom bombs.
"In any case, the purpose of the artist, which is artistic merit, has no legal force at all."
I'm not a lawyer, but I think you're just trying to sound like one. You sound overly certain of some overly general statements to support of an absurd proposition. You're telling me that a half-decent lawyer couldn't find some basis in law to protect a Picasso rendition of Mickey Mouse? Baloney. The "critical commentary" clause you allow would probably serve.
And almost all culture production derivative of Disney wouldn't involve ripping off Disney's digits in the first place. Someone would be shooting something with their own camera. The legal situation generally has nothing to do with DRM.
"the net effect of all these local optimizations across society is not globally optimal"
Says you. I daresay that any image Picasso stole from Pinocchio would be so radically revised as to escape the Mouse's copyright. I don't think you know what you are talking about.
Now, if you are trying to persuade me to dislike DRM, and to buy accordingly, you're preaching to the choir. If you trying to say we should outlaw DRM -- buzz off. I don't want you controlling my movies anymore than than I do Disney. I can already ignore Disney. If you write the law, I can't ignore you. And I'd like to retain the right do so, at my option.
> Currently there are rules governing the posting of *official* House of Reps material . . .
> It says *nothing* about prohibiting posting of opinions by house members on any web site. Nothing.
That depends on the meaning and interpretation of *official*, doesn't it?
I don't know what the Administration Committee is up to. But bear in mind that nowadays a successful censor would have to control speech without announcing they are controlling speech. The American Constitution was an innovation in methods for the prevention of the abuse of power, but it would be foolish to imagine that those who would abuse power (eg, anyone holding it) won't come up with counter-innovations of their own. There is more safety in norms and methods that can't be abused by anyone than in presuming we can identify the abusers and keep them out of power. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
Honestly, I find these kinds of statements to be a bit off-base. I really get the feeling that Creationism and Evolution/Darwinism are artificially pitted against each other as if one or the other has to "win."
Exactly.
Statements like this (from the article) . . .
evolution by natural selection -- the strongest argument against an Old Testament-type creator -- is so counter-intuitive to so many"
. . . make me wonder whether the writer has read Aristotle.
What they require, however, is what often appears to be mind-numbing repetition. It's work.
You don't necessarily disagree with gadzook's comment. Absolutely, mastery and conceptual competence require a lot of practice and thought.
But he wrote:
If someone from the beginning had told me how to visualize what integration was, I think I would have gotten it immediately.
Maybe he imagines that visualizing an integral's meaning prepares him for advanced math, but let's imagine he's not an idiot.
Mastering integration requires a lot of work and going through a lot of small steps to get the big picture, but what's so bad by explaining at the start that we're going to find a way to extract the distance traveled from this function for acceleration over time? Anyone can get that distance is velocity * time, and that's the area under the graph of velocity against time whether that line is straight or wavy -- and integration lets us get quickly get a precise answer to the question. Ten minutes motivating the concept and the students then know _why_ they're going through all this mind-numbing detail.
Of course, it's an old problem:
"One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve . . . and said, 'I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?'
"I . . . said 'The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.'
"All the guys were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this 'discovery' -- even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already 'learned' that the derivatice (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of _any_ curve is zero (horizontal). . . . They didn't even know what they 'knew.'
"I don't know what's the matter with people; they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" p. 36-37
I expect you're right that linear progression through concepts is the only way to master them -- but that doesn't preclude showing students what they're about to learn, or what they've just mastered.
Now, for the original poster, I'd suggest reviewing why you did so poorly at math in high school. Were you just lazy? or distracted? Or did work hard but have trouble remembering concepts and synthesizing them into larger concepts? Did you do your homework someplace noisy and distracting? Etc. If you can figure out why you did poorly before, that may help you figure out which weakness you have to focus on first.
Some of these problems might be cognitive. If you have trouble focusing, or remembering concepts, or linking things together, you might have a condition like ADD or dyslexia. Those things can be overcome with different methods and / or medication -- and if _those_ are the problem, you'll have slow going until you address them.
How much poetry are you teaching, how challenging is it, and how closely are the kids reading it?
Really good poetry packs as much meaning into words as it can, often relies on context and themes to enhance meaning, and turns on precise understanding of words' meanings to deliver its effect. Shakespearean sonnets are incredibly _crafted_. Their density prevents understanding on a first or second reading, but that construction yields huge rewards once you've chewed the thing over.
Attention to that kind of construction and precision seems to me similar to good code. If you can teach that, you aren't necessarily teaching the love of math or science, but you are teaching a universal skill. And once they grasp it, you might then be able to point to parallels in engineering or technology.
I don't want anybody in a leadership capacity who is capable of believing in something so provably false
It isn't _provably_ false until you can prove that the laws of science always behave the same in all places and at all times. You can't prove that they did so in my basement five minutes ago, so I don't think you'll manage for the Garden of Eden 10,000 years ago.
Science sits on top of a system of philosophy and epistemology that depends on _reason_, not evidence. The evidence is meaningless without a system to analyze it. The only reason we have science in the first place is because folks like Aristotle and Descartes worked out what we know and don't know, and how we know anything at all.
I doubt Sam Brownback understands any of this any better than you do, but then again Hillary Clinton is probably in the same boat. Her opinions on evolution happen to be closer to mine than Brownback's, but I bet hers have more to do with conventional wisdom than with any serious attention to the matter. And I bet her views would evolve nicely if 70% of the electorate suddenly agreed with Brownback.
Put Options are generally less risky than short sales because your maximum loss is limited to the purchase price of the contract.
Yes, but only for one of the several valid aspects of "risk". While losses on puts are bounded, the value of the put will vary more (and generally a lot more) than the value of the short.
If you short a stock at $50, and it moves to $55, you lose $5, or 10% of your position. If you but a put with a $40 strike when the stock is at $50, and the stock moves to $55, the value of your put will fall by more than 10%, and generally a lot more.
Much of the short's "unlimited loss" risk can be managed. As the stock rises, you close some or all of the position -- at a loss, but a bounded one. There is an important exception: if the stock's value moves while the markets are closed, _then_ you're screwed. For example, if the company announces after trading that they've been bought at a huge premium, there is nothing you can do about it. The previously posted hedge with an "out of the money" call can cover this, for a price.
On top of that, option plays need to be right about larger moves over longer time frames than do stock plays. Options are less liquid than the underlying stock, and so it's harder to find buyers and sellers at "fair" prices, and so you need larger moves in the stock price to get the option value moves you need to make the thing work. That's obviously harder.
There is no one measure of risk. But I think the majority of investors in the majority of cases will conclude that shorting is less "risky" than options.
(Of course, the majority of investors in the majority of cases will conclude they're better off in an index fund, but that's not in the spirit of the thing . . ..)
This sale off of the old analog TV spectrum has been in the Federal budget projections for quite a few years now...they've been counting on this $$ for quite awhile.
That budget has projections for every dollar expected by the government -- does that mean that every single one of those collections was devised for the primary purpose of raising revenue? For example, many programs have nominal fees that are intended mostly to limit usage to participants with some prior commitment and interest. Park service user fees, for example, or state matching funds for transportation projects.
I don't see why anyone but incumbent carriers objects so strongly to this. The auction isn't intended to raise revenue so much as to allocate spectrum to the most efficient user by letting the market price the license. I certainly don't see why a restriction-positive license is better policy than an "open only" license.
The Wall Street Journal complained yesterday that the winner of "open" spectrum would either try to get out of the requirements or leave it idle as the buyer would be financially or technically incompetent to build it out. But surely those contingencies can be managed with some kind of buildout requirement, ie use it (or at least have spent X% of the auction price on buildout) in [7] years or lose the spectrum.
So the risk is delayed usage. But without some evidence that the current licenses are headed into unmanageable congestion (and it's certainly possible), the loss to public from delay doesn't seem catastrophic. And that risk has to be balanced against the possible gains from an open license. Maybe the risk is greater than the upside, but why reject the whole idea before Martin even releases the draft?
(I suppose one problem with an open license is restrictions on wholesaling. If a restricted license service needs spectrum to relieve congestion, could they lease access on an open license for their restricted services? On the one hand, forbidding such leasing closes a backdoor to restrictions. On the other, such leases could be a desirable use of otherwise idle spectrum. Maybe a solution could be to allow such leases but require that they be assigned lower priority than open services? You'd still need rules to keep the open licensee from gaming this into de facto restrictions.)
I don't see why smart people like the WSJ are so quick to judge this. I too worry about the property right / deal compliance problems of net-neutrality, but none of that applies to a _new_ license. Maybe it's just a knee-jerk reaction? Maybe the net-neutrality arguments have gotten so emotional people can't think about them? I suppose many readers here will think the WSJ is just a corporate shill, but I actually think that's one the less likely (and least interesting) explanations.
Caveat lector -- I know nothing about this field at all!
Do they even have those classes any longer?
No, not really, not that they were ever so good to begin with. And who exactly teaches those classes and how are the costs of those classes funded? and why would we expect them to be taught well?
I'm pretty much impervious to all complaints about this administration. Bush et al go to court like anyone else and they obey the judicial orders like anyone else, often after appeal but that too is like anyone else. They're out of office in less than two years at which point someone else will continue the same kinds of things but to different ends and we'll get the same complaints and defenses but from different characters. Maybe there's something more than grist for someone's propaganda mill but every time I check it's the same old thing.
I love that we cannot trust our government. It's the founding idea of our constitution.
The idea that _this_ administration is the only one that shouldn't be trusted is confusing and dangerous. It makes people vulnerable to trusting other administrations, or institutions like Congress or the courts, or politicians when really they all bear watching. None of them get anything like the scrutiny they deserve.
the universe has always existed, it neither came into existance, nor will it "ever" end (which is a bogus question anyway, since time only exists INSIDE the universe, it's pointless to ask what was there before the beginning of time, like it's pointless to ask where the moon is on the surface of the earth : it just isn't a location)
You may be interested to know that Christian theology thinks of time in a similar way, in that it imagines time as inherently linked to the universe. It does goes on to posit that time and the universe are created by God, who exists outside both and is subject to neither. As suggested by other posters, neither idea is experimentally disprovable.
It's a very old idea -- Boethius discussed it 1500 years ago.
"States may have systems of checks and balances"
Or they may not. They tend to "not", because the people in them always like power and always work to erode the checks. That's why you want a strong society with a lot of activity outside them -- so society itself has as many checks against the state as possible. Property and markets are among the most important of those checks.
That's the third time I've said the same thing, which is enough -- I'm done. Be well, friend.
Your terms are full of inaccuracies and flawed assumptions, and you ignore the main point. Any flaw in a "property" society attributable to human nature will also occur in any other. In your society of politically distributed goods, the collusion occurs not among the propertied owners but the influential, and occurs in a system constructed without any check on state activity or limitation on its justifications.
The justification for property here isn't that it's perfect or fair -- I'm sure its abused all the time, though your particular objections aren't likely -- but that it is far better safer than the alternatives.
1. You work for someone else. You have labor, it has value, someone will pay you for it.
2. Yeah, "dominance" in property happens, but it can only go so far. It can't coerce, it can only buy, and anyway there are other properties. But when the government is dominated, where can you go for relief? Only to the same electorate that was persuaded to elect the dominant government in the first place.
_Any_ system of government automatically leads to some kind of "oligarchy". Ability is unevenly distributed among inviduals, and no matter how you base your government, somebody is eventual control it. In your government, it's an oligarchy of those most able to sell their particular interest as the public interest.
The political purpose of private property is to leave so much power and activity outside the government that those that do dominate can't infringe so much on any one else.
As I've heard the story, Kissinger's notation on each version was neither abusive nor specific -- just, "Is the best you can do?" As the story goes, the author finally walked in after version three or four and said, no, I can't do any better -- and then Kissinger said he'd read it.
If they are going to offer linux, couldn't they use DSL or Knoppix to manage their on-disk recovery functions? A lot of these things already ship with a recovery partition. Why couldn't they ship with a partition for DSL/Knoppix, a partition with compressed recovery images, and a bootloader? Windows users just default to Windows, but if they need recovery, they boot to linux, which could have a diagnostic script (for the help desk) and a recovery script that reloads the Windows stuff. (Better yet, the recovery desk could ssh into the computer under linux to see what's really gone wrong with Windows.) If the disk also ships with separate partitions for the Windows OS, Windows programs, and a big data partition, recovery just got a lot easier, and the data is a lot safer. Dell and its users get a better recovery solution, and fits into the hard drive footprint already dedicated to that function.
It's good for linux because the disk is already partitioned and set for dual boot, which might be the scariest installation steps for a newbie, and there is a linux distro (albeit small) already on the machine. Add a linux upgrade script for the uninitiated -- maybe one that just adds a distro to leave the "recovery linux" in place for future interactions with Dell -- and the computer can go to full blown linux whenever its user wants to.
I'm a noob myself so I don't know if the partitioning scheme is valid (one Windows, one Windows programs, one data, one linux, one linux swap, one recovery images and scripts -- six total), but personally I'd be interested in that configuration, and certainly would be if the incremental cost over Windows only were zero.
If someone proposed to work routinely on a large enterprise network as root without backup, you'd call them an idiot. If they gave that access to someone who clearly didn't know what they were doing, you'd look for stronger language. If NASA did it on mission critical systems with people in orbit, you'd call them criminal.
So why does it make sense to let people mess around with the genome? We barely understand human psychology and its physiological roots -- we're getting started, but we don't yet know even what we don't know. We certainly don't understand how that psychology interacts to form groups and societies. The American founding fathers probably had the best, most practicable understanding of human nature and politics in human history, and their findings are largely ignored. Even if we understood all this, why are you so sure that we won't see a biotech Bill Gates, creating God knows what because it's commercially interesting?
The idea of an infinite, loving God creating people inspires a certain reverent awe at His creation. If you don't go for that, reflect on the complexity and diversity of a genome that has evolved over billions of years and succeeded in a nearly infinite array of challenges. And we're going to mess with that because we might get some marginal improvements? I'd say the risk/reward analysis on this is fairly clear, and will be until we know an awful lot more, and are far better people, than we do and are currently.
I'm not that worried about sheep genomes, but I am worried about an attitude that provides zero barriers to some nightmare scenarios.
Slashdot Mirror
Fewer armaments don't necessarily mean more stability. The outcome of a chess match where both sides have all their pieces is far less clear than one where one side has two pawns and the other one. There are many scenarios in the latter case where one side can predict victory with 100% -- which would certainly encourage them to play the game for high stakes. I am more interested in the plausible nuclear endgame scenarios than I am in the number of cities we could level with the initial force. That endgame analysis is the one that is going to deter people. The likelihood of someone "going for it" diminishes as the likely endgame states become more clearly and more convincingly bad, and as the diversity of strategic viewpoints convinced of those states grows. You don't have "enough" until the other guy knows damn well you'll have enough no matter what he does. That endgame analysis is currently completely unacceptable to either side. So why would we mess with that? Because there isn't much strategic tension between the US and Russia _today_? No one would have predicted such relations 25 years ago, and I doubt anyone can predict the situation 25 years from now. Russian behavior in Georgia, Chechnya and Eastern Europe hardly suggests they're abandoned their ambitions. I'm sure they have a similar opinion of our activity in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US and the Soviets had constructed a reasonably stable strategic position by the 70s and 80s, which is something of a miracle given the frightfulness of these weapons. I think we'd better be pretty careful before we completely dismantle that. It isn't as if anyone will forget the construction of atom bombs.
"In any case, the purpose of the artist, which is artistic merit, has no legal force at all."
I'm not a lawyer, but I think you're just trying to sound like one. You sound overly certain of some overly general statements to support of an absurd proposition. You're telling me that a half-decent lawyer couldn't find some basis in law to protect a Picasso rendition of Mickey Mouse? Baloney. The "critical commentary" clause you allow would probably serve.
And almost all culture production derivative of Disney wouldn't involve ripping off Disney's digits in the first place. Someone would be shooting something with their own camera. The legal situation generally has nothing to do with DRM.
"But Disney wrote the law, so how can you ignore them?"
By not buying their stuff.
"the net effect of all these local optimizations across society is not globally optimal" Says you. I daresay that any image Picasso stole from Pinocchio would be so radically revised as to escape the Mouse's copyright. I don't think you know what you are talking about. Now, if you are trying to persuade me to dislike DRM, and to buy accordingly, you're preaching to the choir. If you trying to say we should outlaw DRM -- buzz off. I don't want you controlling my movies anymore than than I do Disney. I can already ignore Disney. If you write the law, I can't ignore you. And I'd like to retain the right do so, at my option.
> Currently there are rules governing the posting of *official* House of Reps material . . .
> It says *nothing* about prohibiting posting of opinions by house members on any web site. Nothing.
That depends on the meaning and interpretation of *official*, doesn't it?
I don't know what the Administration Committee is up to. But bear in mind that nowadays a successful censor would have to control speech without announcing they are controlling speech. The American Constitution was an innovation in methods for the prevention of the abuse of power, but it would be foolish to imagine that those who would abuse power (eg, anyone holding it) won't come up with counter-innovations of their own. There is more safety in norms and methods that can't be abused by anyone than in presuming we can identify the abusers and keep them out of power. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
Exactly.
Statements like this (from the article) . . .
evolution by natural selection -- the strongest argument against an Old Testament-type creator -- is so counter-intuitive to so many". . . make me wonder whether the writer has read Aristotle.
You don't necessarily disagree with gadzook's comment. Absolutely, mastery and conceptual competence require a lot of practice and thought.
But he wrote:
If someone from the beginning had told me how to visualize what integration was, I think I would have gotten it immediately.Maybe he imagines that visualizing an integral's meaning prepares him for advanced math, but let's imagine he's not an idiot.
Mastering integration requires a lot of work and going through a lot of small steps to get the big picture, but what's so bad by explaining at the start that we're going to find a way to extract the distance traveled from this function for acceleration over time? Anyone can get that distance is velocity * time, and that's the area under the graph of velocity against time whether that line is straight or wavy -- and integration lets us get quickly get a precise answer to the question. Ten minutes motivating the concept and the students then know _why_ they're going through all this mind-numbing detail.
Of course, it's an old problem:
"One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve . . . and said, 'I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?'
"I . . . said 'The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal.'
"All the guys were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this 'discovery' -- even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already 'learned' that the derivatice (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of _any_ curve is zero (horizontal). . . . They didn't even know what they 'knew.'
"I don't know what's the matter with people; they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!"
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" p. 36-37
I expect you're right that linear progression through concepts is the only way to master them -- but that doesn't preclude showing students what they're about to learn, or what they've just mastered.
Now, for the original poster, I'd suggest reviewing why you did so poorly at math in high school. Were you just lazy? or distracted? Or did work hard but have trouble remembering concepts and synthesizing them into larger concepts? Did you do your homework someplace noisy and distracting? Etc. If you can figure out why you did poorly before, that may help you figure out which weakness you have to focus on first.
Some of these problems might be cognitive. If you have trouble focusing, or remembering concepts, or linking things together, you might have a condition like ADD or dyslexia. Those things can be overcome with different methods and / or medication -- and if _those_ are the problem, you'll have slow going until you address them.
How much poetry are you teaching, how challenging is it, and how closely are the kids reading it? Really good poetry packs as much meaning into words as it can, often relies on context and themes to enhance meaning, and turns on precise understanding of words' meanings to deliver its effect. Shakespearean sonnets are incredibly _crafted_. Their density prevents understanding on a first or second reading, but that construction yields huge rewards once you've chewed the thing over. Attention to that kind of construction and precision seems to me similar to good code. If you can teach that, you aren't necessarily teaching the love of math or science, but you are teaching a universal skill. And once they grasp it, you might then be able to point to parallels in engineering or technology.
Yes, but only for one of the several valid aspects of "risk". While losses on puts are bounded, the value of the put will vary more (and generally a lot more) than the value of the short.
If you short a stock at $50, and it moves to $55, you lose $5, or 10% of your position. If you but a put with a $40 strike when the stock is at $50, and the stock moves to $55, the value of your put will fall by more than 10%, and generally a lot more.
Much of the short's "unlimited loss" risk can be managed. As the stock rises, you close some or all of the position -- at a loss, but a bounded one. There is an important exception: if the stock's value moves while the markets are closed, _then_ you're screwed. For example, if the company announces after trading that they've been bought at a huge premium, there is nothing you can do about it. The previously posted hedge with an "out of the money" call can cover this, for a price.
On top of that, option plays need to be right about larger moves over longer time frames than do stock plays. Options are less liquid than the underlying stock, and so it's harder to find buyers and sellers at "fair" prices, and so you need larger moves in the stock price to get the option value moves you need to make the thing work. That's obviously harder.
There is no one measure of risk. But I think the majority of investors in the majority of cases will conclude that shorting is less "risky" than options.
(Of course, the majority of investors in the majority of cases will conclude they're better off in an index fund, but that's not in the spirit of the thing . . .So I guess that explains why Jobs is so adamantly opposed to The Button.
This sale off of the old analog TV spectrum has been in the Federal budget projections for quite a few years now...they've been counting on this $$ for quite awhile. That budget has projections for every dollar expected by the government -- does that mean that every single one of those collections was devised for the primary purpose of raising revenue? For example, many programs have nominal fees that are intended mostly to limit usage to participants with some prior commitment and interest. Park service user fees, for example, or state matching funds for transportation projects.
The Wall Street Journal complained yesterday that the winner of "open" spectrum would either try to get out of the requirements or leave it idle as the buyer would be financially or technically incompetent to build it out. But surely those contingencies can be managed with some kind of buildout requirement, ie use it (or at least have spent X% of the auction price on buildout) in [7] years or lose the spectrum.
So the risk is delayed usage. But without some evidence that the current licenses are headed into unmanageable congestion (and it's certainly possible), the loss to public from delay doesn't seem catastrophic. And that risk has to be balanced against the possible gains from an open license. Maybe the risk is greater than the upside, but why reject the whole idea before Martin even releases the draft?
(I suppose one problem with an open license is restrictions on wholesaling. If a restricted license service needs spectrum to relieve congestion, could they lease access on an open license for their restricted services? On the one hand, forbidding such leasing closes a backdoor to restrictions. On the other, such leases could be a desirable use of otherwise idle spectrum. Maybe a solution could be to allow such leases but require that they be assigned lower priority than open services? You'd still need rules to keep the open licensee from gaming this into de facto restrictions.)
I don't see why smart people like the WSJ are so quick to judge this. I too worry about the property right / deal compliance problems of net-neutrality, but none of that applies to a _new_ license. Maybe it's just a knee-jerk reaction? Maybe the net-neutrality arguments have gotten so emotional people can't think about them? I suppose many readers here will think the WSJ is just a corporate shill, but I actually think that's one the less likely (and least interesting) explanations.
Caveat lector -- I know nothing about this field at all!
You may be interested to know that Christian theology thinks of time in a similar way, in that it imagines time as inherently linked to the universe. It does goes on to posit that time and the universe are created by God, who exists outside both and is subject to neither. As suggested by other posters, neither idea is experimentally disprovable.
It's a very old idea -- Boethius discussed it 1500 years ago.
"States may have systems of checks and balances" Or they may not. They tend to "not", because the people in them always like power and always work to erode the checks. That's why you want a strong society with a lot of activity outside them -- so society itself has as many checks against the state as possible. Property and markets are among the most important of those checks. That's the third time I've said the same thing, which is enough -- I'm done. Be well, friend.
Your terms are full of inaccuracies and flawed assumptions, and you ignore the main point. Any flaw in a "property" society attributable to human nature will also occur in any other. In your society of politically distributed goods, the collusion occurs not among the propertied owners but the influential, and occurs in a system constructed without any check on state activity or limitation on its justifications. The justification for property here isn't that it's perfect or fair -- I'm sure its abused all the time, though your particular objections aren't likely -- but that it is far better safer than the alternatives.
1. You work for someone else. You have labor, it has value, someone will pay you for it. 2. Yeah, "dominance" in property happens, but it can only go so far. It can't coerce, it can only buy, and anyway there are other properties. But when the government is dominated, where can you go for relief? Only to the same electorate that was persuaded to elect the dominant government in the first place.
_Any_ system of government automatically leads to some kind of "oligarchy". Ability is unevenly distributed among inviduals, and no matter how you base your government, somebody is eventual control it. In your government, it's an oligarchy of those most able to sell their particular interest as the public interest. The political purpose of private property is to leave so much power and activity outside the government that those that do dominate can't infringe so much on any one else.
As I've heard the story, Kissinger's notation on each version was neither abusive nor specific -- just, "Is the best you can do?" As the story goes, the author finally walked in after version three or four and said, no, I can't do any better -- and then Kissinger said he'd read it.
It's good for linux because the disk is already partitioned and set for dual boot, which might be the scariest installation steps for a newbie, and there is a linux distro (albeit small) already on the machine. Add a linux upgrade script for the uninitiated -- maybe one that just adds a distro to leave the "recovery linux" in place for future interactions with Dell -- and the computer can go to full blown linux whenever its user wants to.
I'm a noob myself so I don't know if the partitioning scheme is valid (one Windows, one Windows programs, one data, one linux, one linux swap, one recovery images and scripts -- six total), but personally I'd be interested in that configuration, and certainly would be if the incremental cost over Windows only were zero.
If someone proposed to work routinely on a large enterprise network as root without backup, you'd call them an idiot. If they gave that access to someone who clearly didn't know what they were doing, you'd look for stronger language. If NASA did it on mission critical systems with people in orbit, you'd call them criminal. So why does it make sense to let people mess around with the genome? We barely understand human psychology and its physiological roots -- we're getting started, but we don't yet know even what we don't know. We certainly don't understand how that psychology interacts to form groups and societies. The American founding fathers probably had the best, most practicable understanding of human nature and politics in human history, and their findings are largely ignored. Even if we understood all this, why are you so sure that we won't see a biotech Bill Gates, creating God knows what because it's commercially interesting? The idea of an infinite, loving God creating people inspires a certain reverent awe at His creation. If you don't go for that, reflect on the complexity and diversity of a genome that has evolved over billions of years and succeeded in a nearly infinite array of challenges. And we're going to mess with that because we might get some marginal improvements? I'd say the risk/reward analysis on this is fairly clear, and will be until we know an awful lot more, and are far better people, than we do and are currently. I'm not that worried about sheep genomes, but I am worried about an attitude that provides zero barriers to some nightmare scenarios.